


and we'll tear the price tags off our backs.

by hexaS



Series: how to take over the world [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alpha Universe, Character Study, Gen, Post-Scratch, Sadstuck, not really but kind of?? it's alpha universe after all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-08-08 22:45:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7776616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hexaS/pseuds/hexaS
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's always known that one day, before her very eyes, the remnants of a shattered Earth would turn to dust between the painted nails of an extraterrestrial fish being from galaxies away.</p>
<p>Fear affects the strongest of us, and Rose Lalonde is no stranger to it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and we'll tear the price tags off our backs.

**Author's Note:**

> _let's promise no matter what from now on, that we'll tear the price tags from our backs._
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> I have wanted to finish this up for ages, I love post-scratch feels so much. I wanted to write some alpha universe guardians where Rose was the one who was shaky and uncertain and scared because she's so uncertain of the future and she _hates_ it. Enjoy.

When Rose Lalonde is eight years old, she begins writing a journal.

People always assume for her to be the type to meticulously meter out every page, keeping a diary with regular entries marking every step of her life.

They could not have been more wrong.

She keeps her journals until the day she leaves them sitting in a dusty, ostentatiously taped-up cardboard box (for the irony) and she only ever updates them when she really, really needs to.

The entries are as sporadic as they could possibly be, the time differences ranging between mere minutes apart to several months, even a year. Never more than a year, though. There is always too much to write to leave them for a year.

Her journals are invariably leather-bound, yellow-paged little books, filled from cover to cover in black ink from a thousand different pens. Tea and coffee stains line the pages (never alcohol; she never drinks when she writes her journals), and there are frayed remnants of the paper lying in between the yellow leaves at various points.

It would be centuries until anybody else would get to read the sometimes carefully scripted, often messily scrawled blots of ink running lines across the yellow paper. She wrote these journals in full knowledge of this.

When Rose Lalonde turns ten, she has a dream about a boy with a heart made of clockwork and a pulse threaded with beads of flame. He's surrounded by pools of blood, and even the shallowest of puddles is the map of an ocean.

She dreams vividly, blurred faces of death and battle ricocheting within the realms of her sleep. Sometimes there are shadows that rest in the recesses of her mind, seeping into cracks and always seething, always writhing. They talk to her, but she does not talk back.

When she is twelve, she begins drafting up a dark, horror-fantasy novel series under the title of _Complacency of the Learned_ , on a dusty spring afternoon in the middle of April. She has yet to tell anyone about her dreams, so she writes them into her stories.

She finds too many problems in her writing, though; her characters are flat and lifeless and she doesn't know why, doesn't know if it is her own paranoia or a true lack of emotion conveyed within the thousands of lines of text.

She has been keeping a journal for four years, now, and the entries are as random and oddly jotted as they have always been, although she occasionally scoffs at her eight year-old self's handwriting.

Rose Lalonde is seventeen when she gets out of high school, and then the dreams get worse. There is a very fine line between dreams and proper nightmares, and every night, she tiptoes along that line unsteadily, like a drop of residual water hanging off the shower faucet, waiting to succumb to the pull of gravity. She sees the end of the world in an hourglass, one day, and she drops it quickly, instantly, and barely registers the shards of glass glimmering around her feet. 

It becomes more frequent, after that. Rose Lalonde can see the world in a grain of sand.

Her original novels, the _Complacency of the Learned_ series which she began a decade back, sit, imperfect, within the depths of her other manuscripts. She begins her career as an author with a collection of short stories alluding to her nightmares, and gains a little bit of fame.

At the same time, a boy by the name of David ('just Dave,' he had continuously insisted) suddenly gains media attention for his unbelievably shitty webcomics, fresh out of college.

The boy from her dreams is real, and it scares her. It terrifies her, because from the age of ten she has seen the world crumbling beneath her feet and civilisations drown beneath the rule of an alien dictator, and if the boy is real then perhaps everything else is, too.

She remembers (distantly, like the gentle dusting of fog that appears in the mornings, disappearing as quickly as it appears) being sixteen and sharp and eloquent and graceful, and she can only hope that she is the same now.

She has the same quick tongue and extensive vocabulary; her replies share the same acidity and mild poetic quality, but this time round, she can feel fear, quiet whispers of doubt and tension pooling in her gut.

She meets Dave Strider for the first time at a social event, except to her surprise, he comes to her.

"Ever had any siblings?"

She knows it's him, even as he stands behind her, because the slight drawl to his words is already too familiar.

She sets her face into a stiff smile, and turns to face him.

For one, he's taller than she has ever seen him; it makes sense, after all. They're both adults now, have actually had time to fill our their gangly teenage frames, and he's a good head or so taller than her, but he has terrible posture, with two hands carelessly placed in his pockets, and a pair of the wrong aviator sunglasses perched on his face.

He looks good in a suit, though.

"Rose Lalonde." She holds out a hand, and he just raises a fist. With a light laugh, she bumps it.

"Dave Strider. Here, have my number." He hands her a little piece of paper with a couple of lines of red writing (the most awful, angular handwriting she's ever seen, really) and walks off.

She spends the rest of the night with her stomach churning and her brain burning scarlet words into her vision.

Things become more real, after that. For a week or so, she realises how scared she is, realises that the world is going to end because _she's seen it_. She'd never admit it, but she loses sleep- too much sleep- over being afraid of what she might see, and this is what leads her to dial in the little red string of numbers she'd gotten eight days ago.

"'Sup? This is my personal phone, who's this?"

"Dave."

"Oh. Rose. Was wondering when you'd call, I've just-" She can hear the slight smirk in his voice.

"Dave. Dave, is it real?" She's still holding the slip of paper in her hand, crumpling it slowly and then flattening it out, smoothing the creases.

"Well, yeah? I mean, I don't remember very much, but-"

"How much do you remember?"

"Geez, Lalonde, would ya stop interrupting me? I remember you, at least. And there were two others, I'm not quite sure, but I can't remember much more than that. I know that we have _something_ to do together, though."

She listens carefully, trying to separate his level of information and hers.

"... Rose? You there?"

She breathes. "Yes, I am still here." She can hear him breathing a sigh of relief.

"Oh. Good. What do you remember?"

Pause.

"Dave, do you remember how my God Tier powers worked?"

She hears the forced exhale on the other end of the line.

"Yeah. So you're saying, you don't remember as much from the past, but you keep seeing things from the future?"

"Good job, Strider. Here, take an A+ and ask your parents to keep it on the fridge." Her sarcasm is flat and just barely a shaky attempt to keep herself together.

Things are silent for a few moments.

"Rose."

Silence.

"Rose. You're not okay, are you?"

And if that isn't an understatement.

"I'm perfectly fine, Dave. Just..."

"Don't worry. I'm booking a flight down there right now." Without another word, he hangs up.

He arrives outside Rose's apartment ten hours later, not even pausing to look at her before wrapping his long arms around her in a hug.

She'd never pegged Dave as the hugging type.

Three cups of tea and a few large sheets of paper later, Dave is sitting at the table, leaning against Rose and sighing over the mess of red-violet scribbles.

He's not sure what to think. He's read her works, sure, they're precisely what he expected from her, heavy fantasy laden with blocks of poetic nonsense, but he still feels like she's holding back.

She's not as arch and composed as he remembers, and something feels slightly off.

"Are you going to publish _Complacency of the Learned_ , soon?"

He hopes that wasn't a bad things to say. She looks up.

"I suppose I shouldn't be surprised you know about that, but..."

She's the most conflicted he's ever seen her.

"Maybe you should revise your drafts. Somehow, I think we're gonna need all the fame we can get, and those long-winded novels of yours seem like the best way to go."

 

Rose Lalonde's new series, the _Complacency of the Learned_ series, becomes a worldwide hit, just as _Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff: The Moive_ hits the screens.

She writes.

As per Dave's suggestion, she pulls out her scrawling plans and dusty drafts from years back, and begins rewriting them, filling in the characters. She imbues them with her fear, writes them as she is: up to their necks in a world that doesn't know it's dying, spurred on by whispers of magic. Her once flat, lifeless characters become animated in her terror.

She gets called in for interviews, increasingly frequently, and it's never a struggle, acting mysterious, violet-eyed and ink-lipped, and she watches Dave's interviews too, when she can.

He always seems so _at ease_.

When he smirks at the camera, it's like his face was built for it. Somehow, his actions are careless but also controlled, and she can't even detect the same level of hesitation nor apprehension she herself always possesses.

Their first large-scale successes boost them immediately into the upper ranks of fame.

Rose calls Dave early one morning.

"Rose? What the fuck are you doing, getting up at 5?"

"I didn't sleep."

There's a brief pause. "Rose, you gotta take care of yourself. I don't exactly have all the details on what we're gonna have to do before the world ends, but--"

"The kids. We have to get ready for the kids."

The silence is long and echoing, slow breathing resounding over the line.

"Kids. Rose, we'd be shit parents and you know it."

She groans in frustration. "We'll be dead by the time they get here. Four hundred years in the future, there's just water and -- _fuck_ , Dave, I can See but I'm not a god anymore, neither are you - the world is going to _end_ , what are we going to do?"

Panic wells within her like water simmering on a stove, little bubbles of uncertainty wavering in her mind.

"Rose. It's alright. You've Seen it, haven't you? We leave things behind for them, stuff so they can survive, and they're fine. We'll do it. Together. Is that alright?"

He's just murmuring to her levelly now, and she has no doubt that if he were here, he'd be looking at her through the shades he'd recently solicited from Ben Stiller, a pair of used aviators she'd seen a thousand times beforehand, making perfect eye contact despite that.

She breathes.

Dave Strider, this new, adult, fundamentally _different_ version of Dave Strider, is harder to read than she'd thought.

"Yeah," she sighs, and some part of her wants to get out a notebook and start analysing everything. "We'll be fine."

The rest of the world might not see it, but they do. The Batterwitch's gradual influence becomes more prominent by the day, and both Rose and Dave work hard, lacing their works with underlying messages and warnings. They're both internationally famous celebrities by now, well into their twenties, getting ready for their thirties, and there is an endless stream of preparations going down.

For their imminent deaths.

Rose would never admit it, but Dave _scares_ her, just as much as the future. She ponders how he can be so carefully constructed; when she looks at him, he's both familiar and a galaxy, a universe away. She remembers a faint, flickering visage of a boy who was a little more awkward, a little more clumsy and shaky and maybe a little more like _her_ ; now, she looks at him and he sounds the same, but she sees little cogs working in his mind, frigid clockwork calculations and he's gotten smarter, more _confident_.

He's strong and she's scared; she can see how he goes tight-lipped and stony-faced when he's recording videos, a hundred different videos of a sunglasses-less face and bright red eyes for only one person to see. She's terrified, more than anything, of herself. She's a blind Seer in the truest sense of the phrase; she can See, but not enough. She knows what will happen, she knows too much, and she's scared of herself, because she might see the end and she doesn't think she can handle that.

Dave finds her crying, one day, bent and broken, clasping a box of yellow-paged journals in her arms. She still writes them. They're at her secluded, overly-large house, and the rain claws down the wide, foggy windows and the lightning dyes the sky in blue-white sheets as he packs boxes away carefully, and takes a glance at the stocked-up alcohol cabinet- _why?_ and locks it tight. He doesn't bother trying to get her up, just hoists her up like a princess - she'd have his head for saying that, any other day - and gently places her on the couch, asking her what's wrong.

They're going to be alone, their two tiny, precious children, a pair of orange-pink sunset-tinged _geniuses_ , and they're going to be lonely and afraid and hurt and she can't do a single thing to help them.

And he tells her, he looks her right in the eye, useless sunglasses set aside, and he tells her that they're already doing everything possible, anything to help their children _right now_.

And they have to create a legacy, they have to stand tall and fight and fight and fight and _fight_ so that one day, one day, hundreds of years in the future, when the world has drowned and there's nothing left except _water, water, water,_ there will be two children, with the hearts of nobles and the minds of _survivors_ , and they'll have a mother, and a brother, to love, and they'll know what to do to save the universe.

 

It's another few years before they step into the beginning of the end; knitting needles and a sword are taken out of their hiding places, and their blood carves dark crimson lines into the earth. 

Centuries pass and the world dies in a storm of fire and fury and flood; until there's nothing left but the lapping of ocean tides and faint pitter-pattering of rain on the domed glass of an ancient observatory.

Too-old, familiar yellow pages that have only gotten more yellow with time, and faded, blue-black ink stain the pages, blotches wet with tears and smudged lines. Wavering, young fingers turn page after page, painting a guardian in her mind, a mother she'll never really have, an earnest youth she'll keep with her forever.

Two children stand together, centuries after the end of the world, and they have blueprints in their mind; memories and fragments of personality left behind for them by a pair of adults they never knew but always cared about, always loved.

Maybe they'd never get to meet their guardians. But for now, they had enough.

**Author's Note:**

> _this everyday may be rotten and decayed, but it's still too early to throw it away._
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> [a song.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI1ZGlpckx4)


End file.
